Chapter 2
2
SUMMER BEFORE FIFTH GRADE
MY STORY BEGINS WITH THE death of my brother.
I’m ten years old. I’m standing on the porch of Sunny Sunday, the main cabin on Cradle Island. The lake is the color of storm clouds. My mom has just come outside from talking on the telephone. She pulls me onto her lap and says something I don’t understand.
“What do you mean, gone?” I ask. I study her expression. It’s too close, her face. Old people look scary up close. I want to get down. I fear I might catch whatever it is that makes her old.
“He isn’t here anymore.”
“But he wasn’t here in the first place,” I say. “He stayed in Winnetka. You said he had summer school, so he stayed home.”
She blinks. Her eyes are big and old.
“How can he be gone if he was never here in the first place?”
And then she starts to cry.
—
BEFORE THIS MOMENT, WE NUMBERED eight. Two parents, six kids.
Caleb, Clarence, Karma, Taz, Henry, Eliot. Caleb, Clarence, Karma, Taz, Henry, Eliot. A list I’ve given a thousand times—to every new teacher, new friend, anyone who cares to ask. I’m the youngest, and I love my siblings. When asked, I recite our names with near-religious pride. “CalebClarenceKarmaTazHenryEliot! CalebClarenceKarmaTazHenryEliot!” The list became a sort of spell. Recite these names enough times and you’ll finally belong to them! Because that’s all I wanted, really. To sit at the big kids’ table.
When I reached the end of the list—when I got to say my own name, to attach it to those five fully formed humans, to claim my place among them, even as just the caboose, hitched to the train by nothing more than the fragile rope of familial obligation—I said it with shiny eyes and a plump-cheeked smile.
—
HENRY AND I WERE WHAT you call Irish Twins—siblings born less than a year apart. From the start, we did everything together. We slept in the same crib, gnawed on the same toys, even ate from the same bowls. The first time Mom tried to acclimate me to real dishware, she dumped me onto the bench next to Hen and handed me a plastic bowl and spoon. The bowl was filled with my very own serving of mush. Henry, of course, had been eating mush for almost a year. The way Mom tells it, I looked at my bowl for only a few seconds before turning to the side and starting in on Henry’s. He didn’t say a word. Just pushed the bowl closer to my half of the table and kept eating. We took turns dipping into the mush. Then, when his bowl was scraped clean, we moved over to mine and kept right on going.
Henry learned to read first. Every night before bed, I’d burst through his door, and he would open whatever fantasy novel was on his nightstand and read aloud until my head started to nod. He created far-off planets for me. Gave each of the characters a different voice. Held dramatic pauses when appropriate. “Where are we going tonight?” I would say.
“The Sahara Desert,” he would say. Or “Hogwarts.” Or “To visit the dinosaurs.”
And I cuddled in close, shut my eyes, and listened as we soared far, far away.
—
THE FUNERAL IS HELD AT our church in Winnetka. All of our relatives fly in. Cousins and uncles and ex-wives and third cousins and third uncles and third ex-wives—people with whom I share blood but whose names I don’t know. We fill every pew in the chapel. A big wooden box sits at the front, boy-sized, like a trick at a magic show. I understand that this is not a magic show. I understand that my brother is inside that box, and he won’t come back out.
—
IN THE WEEK WE SPEND at home before returning to Cradle, as I endure Henry’s wake and funeral and hugs from relatives I don’t know and paper plates sagging beneath cheese triangles and fruit salad, I cling to the fact that it’s just a week. Just one. After that, we’ll return to Cradle for the summer, and everything will be better. Mom calls the blue-green waters that surround the lake “healing.” When I ask her why, she says human beings come from the water, that we’re conceived in water, that we evolved from creatures who swam. So that’s what I tell myself during that miserable week in Chicago. We’re going back , I tell myself . We’re going back. And when we do, we’ll heal.
—
A WEEK LATER, WE RETURN to Cradle. We fly in on the jet. It has eight seats, just big enough for our family. We’re one brother short, but every seat is full.
“What’s that?” I ask, pointing at the oblong purple thing fastened into the seat next to Dad. It looks like a tulip vase, all curvy and long necked.
There’s a long silence.
Finally, seventeen-year-old Karma says, “That’s Henry.”
I look back down at the object. That’s Henry?
“No,” I say. “That’s a vase. Dead people don’t go in vases.”
“Sometimes they do.”
“No,” I say again. “Flowers go in vases. Dead people go in coffins.”
Karma smiles sadly. “Sometimes. But sometimes, they go in one of those instead.”
“It’s not a vase, Gup,” says Clarence from across the plane. “It’s an errrn .”
An errrn ?
I turn the word over in my head. An errrn . Huh.
This is a surprise. There was a coffin at the funeral; I assumed my brother was inside. I assumed I wasn’t allowed to see him, that seeing him was Big Kids Only. A lot of stuff in my life is Big Kids Only, especially since Henry died. But I know how funerals go. I’ve seen them in movies. And movies tell me that dead people go inside a coffin and then into the ground. So I assumed that, after the funeral, my family took him away and buried him in a graveyard with all the other dead people, the way they’re supposed to.
I was wrong.
—
SHORTLY AFTER ARRIVING ON THE island, we gather on the porch of Sunny Sunday. The boys clear away the tables and lounge chairs. They lift them overhead and carry them down the rocks, leaving them scattered about like a poorly arranged living room. We cluster onto the empty patio, the whole family. Dad stands before us, his back to the lake. Clutched between two trembling hands is the errrn .
I glare at it. As it turns out, not only is Henry not safely underground, he’s trapped inside a tiny tulip vase. What an abomination. How did they fit him in there, anyway? Did they shrink him to the size of a teacup? Did his body dissolve into a cloud and whoosh down the neck, like a genie?
Dad is talking. Cradle Island will be Henry’s final resting place, he says. Dad will scatter Henry’s ashes at the center of the island.
Ashes?
Ashes like after a fire?
“I’m going to scatter them alone,” he continues, “so the rest of you won’t see where.”
Ashes like ugly grey powder, all thin and useless? A puddle of spent wood that used to be flame, and before that timber, and before that a tree, tall and sturdy, so tall it saw everything, saw clear across the island?
“Your mother and I…” He glances at Mom, who meets his gaze with watery eyes. “We don’t want Henry to be just one rock or bush or tree.” He smiles. “We want him to be the whole island.”
I watch Dad’s thumb. I think about burning trees. His thumb traces little absentminded circles along the bottom of the vase, slowly, affectionately, as if he believes the vase can feel it. As if it were made of skin, not ceramic.
And that’s when I understand.
“What the hell did you do?” I blurt without thinking.
“Eliot!” says Mom, covering my mouth with her palm.
Dad looks down. Everyone does. I have their attention. They’re waiting for me to go on, but I can’t. A strange feeling bubbles at the base of my throat. It’s hot. It’s boiling .
Is it anger?
No. I know anger. I’ve seen anger. It makes you say things you regret, not lose your speech entirely.
“Eliot?” Dad asks.
Did you burn my brother alive?
“Eliot?”
Is that what you did? Was he so hurt that you tossed his body into a bonfire and let it burn, like nothing more than a fallen tree?
I look at Dad. I can’t ask the questions. They’re gone. They’ve turned to air in my throat. Instead, I ask, “When?”
“When what?”
“When are you going to do it?”
Dad pauses. “Later this summer.”
Later this summer. Later this summer, Dad will dump my brother onto a bush and leave him there. Later this summer, the last traces of Henry will wash away in a heavy rain.
I can’t breathe.
Every spring, Henry and I counted down the days until summer. Crossed them off the calendar on the fridge. A week before our flight, we packed books and sweatpants and every bathing suit in our closet. For Henry and me, summers on Cradle Island weren’t just vacations; they were bliss. They were sunsets and swing chairs and writing musicals and forcing the Big Kids to watch. They were wild sun and roaring thunderstorms and white cheddar mac ’n’ cheese and the wood-burning sauna we stoked until our faces melted.
And now, here on this porch, Clarence’s hand on my shoulder, Karma clinging to Mom, my three living brothers standing straight-backed and flat-footed, just like at the first funeral, only now they’re dressed in patterned swim trunks instead of black suits—even now, Cradle is still all the things Henry and I loved. It’s just that now I have no one to share them with.
—
THE DAY AFTER HENRY’S SECOND funeral, my family wakes to discover the island has been wiped clean of carbohydrates. Overnight, Mom cleared every last cracker, donut, noodle, and Lucky Charm out of the kitchen. Everyone is upset, but Karma, whose relationship with my mother is strained to begin with, is a living volcano.
“Are you shitting me?” she says, opening every single cabinet and slamming them closed when she finds they contain nothing but fruit and nuts. “What are we going to eat now?”
“Protein,” Mom says. She’s pan-frying scrambled eggs and cottage cheese. “And lots of it.”
“Why?”
“Protein is medicine for your muscles and immune system,” she says proudly. The line comes straight from The Zone Diet , which she read the night before.
“But I’m not sick.”
“Yes, you are. You don’t know it because simple sugars are all your body knows, but you are.”
A plate appears before each of the kids. Karma scrunches her lips with disgust, says, “Absolutely not,” slides off her stool, and storms out of the kitchen. For the rest of the week, she walks around Cradle with a sign taped to her shirt that reads, end child hunger now .
—
THE FIRST PASTRIES KARMA BAKES are macarons—the French kind, perfect little sugary sandwiches that look nearly impossible to get right. She’s never even made chocolate chip cookies before.
“Whoa,” says Taz when he walks into Sunny Sunday. “This looks illegal.”
Karma clucks. “Nothing illegal about a little bit of sugar.”
“Where’d you even get that?” he says, eyeing the wrinkled bag of Domino Pure Cane on the counter.
“Let’s just say that there are lots of cabins with lots of cabinets on this island.”
Once Karma starts baking, she doesn’t stop. She bakes aggressively. Vengefully. Blondies. Lemon bars. Cinnamon buns. Raspberry tortes. Peppermint bark. A week passes during which we see Karma only under the strawberry-orange light of the kitchen. Her recipes grow longer, more advanced, requiring two or three tries to get right. But she never gives up. Not until they’re perfect.
Out of my sister’s earshot, I hear Mom mutter, “This is, without a doubt, the strangest form of teenage rebellion I’ve ever seen.”
“This isn’t rebellion, Wendy,” Dad whispers back. “It’s mourning.”
—
FOR AS LONG AS I’VE known Taz—which is my whole life, actually—the only thing he’s wanted to do is make animated movies. Everywhere he goes, his iPad comes with. When he walks, he folds it under his arm like a purse. When he sits, he flicks it open and loses himself in an unknowable universe of castles and aliens and fire-breathing math teachers. Pixelated smiles. Wide-brimmed eyes.
After Henry dies, Taz stops carrying around his iPad. Now, in the kitchen, he holds no electronics at all. He looks naked without them.
Instead he carries a sketch pad. He scratches at it throughout the day—simple drawings so faint they seem to have bled onto the paper from elsewhere. They aren’t storyboards. In fact, there’s no connection between them at all. I find them scattered about the island—decaying fruit, half-finished maps of the world, a face with no identifiable features. It seems he doesn’t care what happens to them once he sets them down.
I start to collect them. When I find a drawing, I slip it into the pocket of my hiking backpack, just in case he needs them one day.
—
I THOUGHT CRADLE ISLAND WOULD fix us. I did. That the waters would heal us, just the way Mom said they could. But here we are, and everywhere I turn, I see grief. I see it in the strange actions of my siblings and the dead silence at the dinner table and the hushed voices of my parents in the hallway outside my bedroom door. Grief didn’t leave; if anything, it burrowed even deeper in. Took the place of the one who left. Grief sits in Henry’s chair at dinner, sleeps in his bed at night. The island, which once seemed ready to burst from all the life packed onto its shores, has become a colorless place.
As I lie in bed at night, I hear my mom whisper to my dad, “You really aren’t worried? I swear, I haven’t seen her cry once.”
“Everyone grieves differently,” says Dad. “She’s so young.”
I shake my head into the pillowcase. Mom is silly to think there’s something wrong with me. I’m the only one who can say Henry’s name without crying. I’m the only one who eats more than half of her dinner. I’m the only one who still goes out exploring. I’m the only one who hasn’t lost her mind.
—
IT’S THE END OF THE summer. I’m hunched into a ball outside my parents’ bedroom, ear pressed to the door. Dad is inside, rummaging about his suitcase. Mom is elsewhere. Tomorrow, we leave.
“This can’t be happening,” Dad says to no one. “They were in here two days ago.” The rummaging increases in intensity. “I never took them out,” he says. “I never even took them out!” Something hits the floor with a great crash.
Then I hear a new sound, an awful sound, like a tornado alarm or a bullhorn. I leap to my feet and throw open the door, forgetting I’m supposed to be hiding. What I find inside is not a siren. It’s my dad, bent on all fours, wailing. That’s the word that pops into my head: wailing . I don’t know where that word came from, but there it is, and there’s my father, hunched over himself. Wailing. The floor is covered in what appears to be the contents of every drawer, closet, and cranny in the bedroom. In the corner is a puddle of shattered purple ceramic.
The errrn .
I stand frozen in the doorway. If Dad sees me, he doesn’t say so. In fact, after this is over—after Dad stops wailing, after I creep back into the hallway, after he slowly picks up the destroyed bedroom and turns on every light in the cabin and takes a thirty-minute-long shower and crawls into bed for the night, even though it’s only 7:30 p.m.—he’ll never mention this scene, or the impossible disappearance that led to it, ever again. Not to me. Not to Mom. Not to anyone, as far as I know. Why would he? Why be so cruel? Why tell us that, when he was finally ready to scatter Henry’s ashes, when he grabbed the errrn and looked inside, there was nothing there? Why tell us that he found only an empty ceramic hole, a dark pit almost as deep as the one now yawning open within him? Why tell us he’s lost the ashes of our dead brother? Even at ten years old, I know he won’t. I watch him there on the floor, and I just know. He won’t make anyone else shoulder this burden. There would be no point.
His arms and legs quiver. His whole body shakes with the weight of holding itself up.
A few months later, his legs will give out forever.